Corporations which provide financial advice to clients and consumers, either directly or through financial professionals, typically place a premium upon the delivery of consistent and complementary advice across the various channels that may be available for delivering such advice. Financial planners and planning organizations generally provide their clients with financial advice such as data, strategies, and recommendations. In addition to utilizing charts, graphs, and other visual aids for presenting this financial advice to clients, financial planners and planning organizations often use specialized calculators, simulators, formatters, and the like to augment the depth and quality of the proffered financial advice. Moreover, due to various Security and Exchange Commission, insurance, financial, legal, and other complex disclosure requirements, the financial data generated during the financial planning process should be appropriately archived, and the financial advice information delivered to the client should include the proper disclosures, disclaimers, and the like.
In the light of these many requirements, the creation of new or specialized financial planning applications which target particular market segments can be costly in terms of both financial expenditures and the time and effort needed to create the applications. In this respect, the prior art has proved disadvantageous in several regards. The architecture of prior art systems generally requires separate financial advice applications for each target market. For example, consumers receiving advice remotely through the Internet and consumers receiving advice directly from professional advisors may receive different advice due to the specific functionality available through the particular financial application used to generate the advice. Thus, the consistency of the advice proffered by a single financial planning organization is frequently compromised by poor integration of the various modes of delivering financial planning advice. Moreover, this lack of integration substantially precludes the effective bundling of application functionalities to create specialized financial advice applications for particular target markets or market segments.
It therefore is desirable to create a system for creating financial advice applications that is easily configurable, centrally controllable, and capable of providing consistent financial advice and information to a broad spectrum of users, such as consumers, clients, and financial planners. Moreover, it is desirable to provide a system which is platform independent and capable of being accessed by application developers using a variety of technologies, programming languages, and methodologies. Additionally, it is desirable to provide a system that is capable of providing specialized financial advice applications that address the financial planning needs of particular market segments of clients.